Djurgårdens IF

Djurgårdens Idrottsförening, commonly known simply as Djurgårdens IF, Djurgården (IPA: [ˈjʉ̂ːrˌɡoːɖɛn]), and (especially locally) Djurgår'n (IPA: [ˈjʉ̌ː(r)ɡɔɳ]), Dif or DIF[upper-alpha 1] – is a Swedish sports association with several sections, located in Stockholm.

Djurgårdens Idrottsförening
® The club logo, adopted in 1896,[1] is a registered trademark.[2]
Founded12 March 1891[3]
Based inStockholm, Djurgården
StadiumTele2 Arena (association football, men), Stockholm Olympic Stadium (association football, women), Hovet (ice hockey), Östermalms IP (bandy)
Colours  Yellow
  Red
  Blue[4]
Official fan clubJärnkaminerna
Websitehttp://DIF.se

Name

The club is named after the City Park and borough Djurgården, which originally was a royal hunting park. A direct translation of Djurgården would be “the animal garden” or "the animal yard". The word djur means "animal" but has the same etymology as the word “deer”, meaning "deer garden" may have been its original meaning.

History

The club was founded in 1891 by a group of young athletes living in the borough and port district Djurgårdsstaden on Djurgården in central Stockholm. Most of the founders were from the shipping industry working class, and Djurgården maintained that profile for most of its early history, in sharp contrast with middle class rivals AIK.[5] With an original focus on winter sports and athletics, the club quickly branched into other sports, becoming one of Sweden's most successful sports clubs of the 20th and 21st century.[6] The club started playing association football in 1899 and soon started a derby rivalry with neighbouring club AIK,[7] the so-called tvillingderbyt.

Today the most popular sections are ice hockey and football, with 16 and 12 Swedish national championship titles respectively. Other popular sections are bandy, handball and floorball. The club has won 470 Swedish championships in 25 different sports through 2023, with this Djurgården is the most successful sports club in Sweden, it is also more championship titles than the two main rivals AIK and Hammarby have together.[8]

Emblem and colours
Djurgårdens IF home and away jerseys in association football in 2002.
Stockholm Olympic Stadium was the homeground of DIF's football team for many decades until the more modern Tele2 Arena was inaugurated in 2013. It is still (2018) the home ground for the women's team and DIF has offices in the Olympic Stadium.

The first emblem of the club was a four-pointed silver star in saltire, which had a shield on it with the letters DIF. This star pre-dates the similar star which Idrottsföreningen Kamraterna adopted and is using to this day. The present emblem, in the form of a shield in yellow, red and blue with the text D.I.F. was adopted in 1896. According to an often-quoted poem by Johan af Klercker from 1908, blue and yellow stand for Sweden and red stands for love.[1] Blue and yellow are also the colours of Stockholm and yellow, red and blue are the colors of the arms of Stockholm County.

Yellow, red and blue are the club colours. The logo is registered as a trademark and the colours are set to Pantone, CMYK and web colour values.[2][9] In many sports – among them football, bandy and handball – the home jersey of the team is vertically striped in light and dark blue. Because of this, blue is usually seen as the most important of the three colours.[10] The ice hockey team uses jerseys in one blue shade with yellow and red details.[11]

Sections

Djurgårdens IF has a number of member sections, all of which legally are their own associations with their own financial and sporting responsibilities but share the common name, logo and values and support each other.[12]

Major sections

Other sections

Former sections

Previously, Djurgårdens IF had sections in other sports. One of these was ski jumping and DIF was one of the best clubs in Sweden in this sport for fifty years.[13]

Fans and fan culture

Djurgården is one of the most supported clubs in Sweden, with most of its supporters living in Stockholm and the neighbouring suburbs.[14] While other Stockholm clubs have profiled themselves as belonging to a certain borough of Stockholm, Djurgården is seen as more of a pan-Stockholm club. No reliable research exists about the spread of Djurgården supporters, but a 2015 T-shirt campaign suggests that supporters are spread fairly evenly throughout the Stockholm area.[15]

In 1981 the main supporter club "Blue Saints" was formed, but due to its notorious fans and their bad reputation, the supporter club changed its name to Järnkaminerna, literally "The Iron Furnaces" (an old nickname for Djurgården athletes from the 1950s). Since 2005, Fabriken is Djurgården's TIFO group; they have two ultras groups: UCS (Ultra caos Stockholm) and Ultras Sthlm.

Djurgården is probably one of a few clubs in the world who is represented both in space (by Christer Fuglesang)[16] and in the Himalayas (by Raul Helander).[17]

Through the years, many types of souvenirs and memorabilia has been made for the club. Stuffed toys in the form of a rabbit called Järnkanin ("Iron Rabbit") are sold, the name a pun on the word Järnkamin.

Club beers

A couple of beers have been created over the years. At present, Alberget 4A is sold for Djurgårdens IF. It is named for the address of the café where the club was founded. The beer was launched in 2013 and is sold through Djurgårdshjälpen, a supporter initiative to raise money for the sports club. Originally, the beer was called Alltid oavsett[18] ("always, no matter what"), which is a slogan often used by supporters of Djurgårdens IF. The beer is a pale lager of 5.0% abv made by Grebbestad Bryggeri on behalf of Djurgårdshjälpen and is not part of Grebbestad Bryggeri's own range of beers.[19]

Famous Djurgården supporters

Organisations in close cooperation

The following non-profit organisations are independent but has a close official cooperation with Djurgårdens IF:[12]

  • DIF Supporters Club (stipends for young and promising athletes etc.)
  • Sällskapet Gamla Djurgårdare
  • Djurgårdsandan (club values)
  • DIF-arkivet (maintaining club history)

Note
  1. In the media, "Djurgårdens IF" is normally abbreviated "Dif", in accordance with Swedish writing standards that state that acronyms that are pronounced as a word, as opposed to letter by letter, should be spelled with the first letter in upper case and the remaining in lower case, thus "Dif". However, some fans of the club, as well as the club itself, prefer to use only uppercase, "DIF", even though they also pronounce it as a word: [diːf].

References
  1. "Det första klubbmärket" (in Swedish). DIF-arkivet. Retrieved 29 March 2014.
  2. "Varumärket". Djurgårdens IF. Archived from the original on 19 April 2014. Retrieved 18 April 2014.
  3. "Bolletinen" (PDF). 2004. Retrieved 29 March 2014.
  4. "DIF.se - Om föreningen". dif.se. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
  5. Andersson, Torbjörn (2002) "Kung fotboll: den svenska fotbollens kulturhistoria från 1800-talets slut"
  6. Nationalencyklopedin, vol. 5 DIO-ET (in Swedish). Höganäs: Bokförlaget Bra Böcker. 1991. p. 50. ISBN 91-7024-619-X.
  7. Cederquist, Jonas (2010). Stockholms fotbollshistoria 1880–2010. Monografier utgivna av Stockholms stad #210. Stockholm: Stockholmia förlag. p. 23.
  8. "Ett SM-guld fäktning. Nu totalt 429 guld" (PDF). DIFarkivet.se. 2014-06-21. Retrieved 2014-08-17.
  9. "Om DIF". Djurgårdens IF Fotboll. Archived from the original on 31 March 2014. Retrieved 18 April 2014.
  10. "Djurgården Fotboll – Officiell webshop". Retrieved 29 March 2014.
  11. "Matchtröjor". Djurgårdens IF Hockey. Retrieved 29 March 2014.
  12. "Föreningar". Djurgårdens IF. Archived from the original on 19 April 2014. Retrieved 18 April 2014.
  13. Ahlbom, Bengt; Hentzel, Roland; Lidman, Sven S., eds. (1948). "Skidsport". Sportens lille jätte (in Swedish). Stockholm: Natur och kultur. p. 890.
  14. "AIK, DIF och Hammarby – hur ser supportrarna ut egentligen? | MEC Sverige". Archived from the original on 2013-08-31. Retrieved 2015-07-18.
  15. "Leaderbord T-shirts DIF Stockholm". google.com. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
  16. Louise (21 June 2011). "Djurgården fick tillbaka flaggan" (in Swedish). Rymdkanalen. Retrieved 6 April 2014.
  17. Jerker Dammbro (12 October 2009). "DIF-flagga 6500 meter över havet" (in Swedish). DIF Hockey: Blogg. Archived from the original on 7 April 2014. Retrieved 6 April 2014.
  18. Linus Norberg (5 September 2013). "Snart finns Djurgården – på Systembolaget". Aftonbladet (in Swedish). Retrieved 23 April 2014.
  19. "Ölen". Djurgårdshjälpen. Archived from the original on 26 July 2013. Retrieved 22 April 2014.
  20. Robert Laul (27 July 2007). "Jag håller på Djurgården" (in Swedish). Aftonbladet Sportbladet. Retrieved 21 April 2014.
  21. ignatiusloloya (9 September 2012). "Palme är djurgårdare". Archived from the original on 2021-12-22. Retrieved 21 April 2018 – via YouTube.
  22. "Lars Ohly om Djurgården | Offside". Archived from the original on 2015-09-24. Retrieved 2015-07-19.
  23. "Thåström håller på Dif". expressen.se. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
  24. "H&M-miljardären öppnar för att satsa i Djurgården" (in Swedish). Fotbollskanalen. 2015-05-08. Retrieved 2015-05-08.
  25. "Djurgården får stöd – från rymden". Aftonbladet (in Swedish). 28 May 2009. Retrieved 21 April 2014.
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